Kapow! Attack of the feminist superheroes

Kapow! Attack of the feminist superheroes

From She-Hulk to Ms Marvel and the new female Thor, a new generation of hero is revolutionising the world of comics and consigning sexualised stereotypes to history. And while some of the ‘fan boys’ are grumbling, this is a battle they just won’t win

The action in issue five of the new series of Thor is par for the course in a superhero comic. Absorbing Man, a granite-coloured lug with a wrecking ball, is on a crime spree and Thor, the Norse thunder god who joined the Marvel Comics universe in 1962, is trying to stop him. The crucial difference in this series is that Thor is now a woman.

The scene is writer Jason Aaron’s pointed riposte to the uproar last summer when Marvel announced that the mantle of Thor would pass to a woman and some aggrieved male fans accused the company of pandering to political correctness. For people outside the comic-book world, the backlash seemed to confirm the old stereotype of fans as aggressively maladjusted man-boys, like Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons.

In fact, a seismic upheaval is under way. The new Thor is outselling her predecessor by 30% – and she’s in good company. Three years ago, writer Kelly Sue DeConnick promoted the former Ms Marvel, Carol Danvers, to Captain Marvel, whose adventures have attracted a loyal cadre of fans called the Carol Corps. Charles Soule reinvented She-Hulk in a witty series that explored her day job as a lawyer. Most significantly, there is G Willow Wilson’s new Ms Marvel, a 16-year-old Pakistani-American Muslim called Kamala Khan. The book has become a cultural phenomenon, covered by CNN, the New York Times and The Colbert Report, and embraced by campaigners against Islamophobia in San Francisco, who plastered over anti-Muslim bus adverts with Kamala stickers. Wilson is currently co-writing an all-female Avengers book, A-Force, with Marguerite Bennett.

Marvel’s “Big Two” rival DC, meanwhile, has refreshed old female characters such as Batwoman, Batgirl, Catwoman, Wonder Woman and the controversial antihero Harley Quinn. In the traditionally more progressive world of independent comics, there are socially diverse hit series such as Saga, Rat Queens, Lumberjanes and The Wicked + The Divine.

Now that superheroes have taken over the summer box office, what happens in comics has major ramifications for mainstream culture. These are the characters that kids grow up with – on World Book Day, primary schools teem with pint-sized Spider-Men – and adults flock to see. The macho lineup of recent movies (no woman has headlined a comic-book film since Catwoman and Elektra flopped a decade ago) makes the genre appear immutably male, but Warner Bros has green-lit a long-overdue showcase for DC’s original feminist crimefighter Wonder Woman, while Marvel has scheduled a Captain Marvel movie for 2018. There are also new TV shows devoted to Captain America’s wartime colleague Peggy Carter, superpowered private detective Jessica Jones, and Supergirl.

The speed of change has surprised even the writers. Wilson, who is a Muslim convert, remembers when Marvel editors Sana Amanat and Stephen Wacker approached her to write Ms Marvel. “[They said: ‘We want to create a new teenage female American Muslim superhero and put her on her own book.’] I thought, ‘You’re insane. You’ll need to hire an intern just to open the hate mail.’ So when, all of a sudden, everybody was talking about it, I was stunned. I believe that if we’d tried to do the exact same book even five years ago the response would have been very different. It’s coming at a very particular time in the history of American comics.”

When Marvel was expanding rapidly in the 1970s, female superheroes were often afterthoughts, cynically created as brand extensions: Spider-Man begat Spider-Woman, Hulk begat She-Hulk, and so on.

“There was an Adam’s rib effect,” says Sean Howe, author of the bestselling Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. “It wasn’t just that these characters were less well thought-out than their male counterparts; they were actually derived from their popular holdings.” (In Thor #5, Absorbing Man’s wife is surprised that the female Thor isn’t called “She-Thor or Lady Thunderstrike”.)

Back then, both the readership and creative roster were overwhelmingly male. While long-time X-Men writer Chris Claremont introduced compelling new women such as Storm, Rogue and Kitty Pryde, their popularity within a team didn’t translate into solo success.

Rat Queens: one of the new generation of female-led comics. Photograph: Image Comics

Ann Nocenti was Claremont’s editor before becoming one of Marvel’s few female writers. Her first assignment was to kill off Spider-Woman.

“Female characters were absolutely seen as secondary,” she says. “I can’t tell if I was just oblivious to sexism and misogyny, but I don’t remember any weird feelings. Not at all. But you would try a female character and the sales would go down. It’s a chicken-and-egg thing.

Why did female superheroes fail? Maybe because nobody was writing for women. I never thought I was writing for women. That was probably a mistake.”

For many years, characters such as Nocenti’s Typhoid Mary, a subversive riff on old female stereotypes, and Claremont’s female X-Men were rare exceptions. Superheroines such as Black Widow and the mutant pop star Dazzler usually played second fiddle, while many artists pandered to adolescent fantasies, drawing superpowered Playmates with wasp-waists, DD busts and frankly impractical costumes. “An artist would come in with samples and sometimes I’d look at them and think y’know, I don’t think this guy has a girlfriend or respects women,” Nocenti remembers.

Marguerite Bennett, who co-writes the Thor spin-off Angela: Asgard’s Assassin with Kieron Gillen, remembers being frustrated as a young reader. “I couldn’t quite articulate why certain things felt off to me,” she writes via email. “Many women were obviously one-dimensional: perfect girlfriends, nagging shrews, femmes fatales – tragic, scorned, disposable women. But even with living heroines, something felt sour and discordant. These heroines were capable, competent, fearless, and yet they somehow wound up swooning or helpless or used only for male validation. Most of western literature focuses on male power fantasies. No one much cares about what a female power fantasy would be.”

Most of western literature focuses on male power fantasies. No one much cares about what a female power fantasy would be

With depressing regularity, female characters were raped, tortured, maimed or killed in order to spur male heroes into action. In 1999, Gail Simone, a pioneering figure for the current generation of female writers, documented this trope on the website Women in Refrigerators. Kelly Sue DeConnick invoked another household object when she told Comics Alliance in 2012: “Never mind the Bechdel test, try this. If you can replace your female character with a sexy lamp and the story still basically works, maybe you need another draft. They have to be protagonists, not devices.” For decades, too many female characters failed the Sexy Lamp Test. So why the sudden change?

Last year’s big comic conventions reported approximate gender parity, with the number of female attendees growing more than twice as fast as male ones. DC co-publisher Jim Lee recently acknowledged that readers were “looking for a lot more flavours and diversity in our line than we’re currently doing”.

“It’s tough to expect corporations to be in the vanguard,” says Howe. “But even the people looking at the bottom line have the sense that you should have something better to offer women than hourglass figures in Spandex.”

Howe suggests that some new readers have been drawn into the Marvel universe by the onslaught of blockbuster movies. Wilson notes the growing number of female retailers. But they agree that the biggest factor is the internet. Twitter, Tumblr and websites such as Comics Alliance and The Mary Sue, have enabled a more inclusive form of comic book fandom. All the female-led books sell better in digital format than in print.

“When I was a child, comics were relegated to stores that were clearly meant for adult men,” says Bennett. “All the same, I was introduced to the characters through cartoons and feature films, and love of those characters provoked me into finding alternate routes to access comics.

On the internet, we could have a community of our own. Girls are growing up among these characters. Why shouldn’t they be welcome?”

Ann Nocenti left the comic book industry in the 90s but returned in 2012, taking over DC’s Catwoman. Her first convention in years was an eye-opener. “I looked around and I thought: ‘This is half women, half men!’ It was completely different. I think if I could go back and start writing Catwoman again my stories would be different. I wasn’t aware there was such a strong female audience.”

Even though the proportion of female creators continues to hover around just 10%, this demographic shift in readership has also changed the way characters are depicted. The costumes designed for Captain Marvel and Ms Marvel by Jamie McKelvie, who draws The Wicked + The Divine, are striking and attractive – they’re superheroes after all – but not oversexualised. Javier Pulido’s deft, playful illustrations for Charles Soule’s She-Hulk were a breath of fresh air for a character who had spent decades looking like a fitness model.

“She-Hulk has sometimes been portrayed as something of a glamorous, sexy, amazon type,” Soule writes via email. “I just presented an extremely competent attorney and superhero who happened to be a beautiful, 7ft-tall green woman. Massively sexualised images of women in mainstream superhero comics are often held up for ridicule these days, which I don’t think would have happened as much even 10 years ago.”

Last year, Teen Titans cover artist Kenneth Rocafort was criticised for drawing the underage Wonder Girl with what blogger and former Batman editor Janelle Asselin called “unrealistic, circle-shaped monster boobs”.

“People can no longer say: ‘Well it’s just you, you’re being oversensitive,’” says Wilson. “There’s a critical mass of people who say: ‘Yo, it’s not really OK to portray a 16-year-old girl like a porn star.’”

The readership is growing and changing and they want to see their stories represented as well

Even so, feminist critics such as Asselin routinely receive vicious abuse and rape threats. The comic book world is experiencing its own, milder version of the Gamergate wars that have convulsed the gaming community, as an angry minority of male fans push back at what they perceive as killjoy political correctness. Breitbart’s Gamergate cheerleader Milo Yiannopoulos claims that comics have been hijacked by “ultra-progressive misandrists who basically hate their own core audiences”. Some older creators agree. The artist Erik Larsen, co-owner of independent publisher Image Comics, recently grouched on Twitter: “I’m tired of the big two placating a vocal minority at the expense of the rest of the paying audience by making more practical women outfits.”

Wilson faced a similar reactionary backlash when Ms Marvel was announced. “I see why they feel threatened,” she says. “They think that there’s a movement afoot to do away with straight, white, male characters all together. Obviously that’s not true. The people who love comics today grew up reading all of that stuff. Nobody’s talking about tearing it all down and beginning from scratch. All they’re saying is that the readership is growing and changing and they want to see their stories represented as well.”

The success of Ms Marvel and Captain Marvel has little to do with identity politics and everything to do with great storytelling. When Carol Danvers had her first solo book as Ms Marvel in 1977 (“This Female Fights Back!”), she was burdened with being Marvel’s token feminist role model: a superpowered Gloria Steinem. The new Ms Marvel, however, is an ordinary adolescent wrestling with parents and school as well as the responsibility of superpowers. Fifty-three years after Stan Lee created Spider-Man, it’s hard for a straight, white man like Peter Parker to represent the gawky underdog. Like the half-black half-Latino Miles Morales, who became a second Spider-Man in 2011, Kamala Khan is a modern take on a classic archetype.

“We didn’t want a model minority book where the whole purpose is to walk around and represent what it’s like to be a south-Asian Muslim in America,” says Wilson. “Kamala’s journey is relatable to anyone who’s ever been a teenager.”

Far from being didactic, these comics honour some of Marvel’s first principles. In the 1960s, superheroes such as Spider-Man outshone DC’s Superman and Batman by having rich, uncostumed lives, with money worries and romantic angst. When The Uncanny X-Men became a phenomenon in the early 80s, Chris Claremont used anti-mutant bigotry as a metaphor for racism and homophobia. These heroes all felt different. Decades later, introducing more LGBT characters and superheroes of colour makes narrative sense. Because the superhero comics industry largely relies on constantly reinventing characters that were created decades ago, it is uniquely well-placed to mirror social change.

“There’s a bit of catchup going on,” says Howe. “And yet when you look at stuff like Ms Marvel you can see that comics can also advance attitudes beyond the status quo. I’m glad that Marvel movies didn’t find their greatest success at a time when Marvel comics were filled with enhanced breasts and shrinking hips.”